Will making a half-billion dollars in its first week of release mean that Deadpool & Wolverine ends talk of Marvel’s decline, maybe even broader talk of Disney’s decline? It’s a fun movie, though it may be too silly and unique for us to extrapolate lessons about the MCU’s future direction, either normatively or descriptively. Even the surprisingly large ecosystem of right-leaning YouTubers who now specialize in attributing Marvel’s (and Disney’s) problems to its leftward political tilt may be flummoxed about what lesson to draw.
Deadpool and Wolverine are ultra-violent tough guys with little time for p.c. sermonizing, and it’s rumored star/writer Ryan Reynolds fended off some feminist tinkering from Disney higher-ups during production—and put in a good word for fired conservative mutant-movie actress Gina Carano to boot—but there have been hints the two lead characters and/or actors are bisexual, both are in some sense immigrants/foreigners, and it’s not clear that luring what’s surely a child-filled audience into an R-rated movie is exactly a conservative thing to do, whatever “conservative” means these days.
If Deadpool doesn’t mind, maybe we should instead call the “merc with a mouth” libertarian. He’s a living embodiment of uncensored speech and gun-toting DIY justice-for-hire. In this movie, his allies even fly an Avengers flag slightly altered to present the anarchist “A.” Hear, hear! These days, after all, the thing that places a character or even an actual human being on broadly-speaking the populist, the non-establishment, and increasingly the non-left side of the culture is simply being unwilling to toe a party line, be it public-sector or private-sector. In some sense, after all, you’re mentally a slave if you don’t dare tell off your government, your boss, or your software provider, regardless of the precise level of taxation you recommend.
Maybe Marvel’s own last, best hope for some measure of spontaneity and creative joy is mouthy, unpredictable, and media-mocking Deadpool, who as it happens—though even comics fans forget this—is something of a combo rip-off of two 1980s characters from rival DC Comics: Deathstroke and Ambush Bug, the former a deadly mercenary with a sword and a mask covering his whole face and the latter a fourth-wall-breaking insectoid wiseass who constantly teleported into other characters’ storylines and commented on what the writers and publishers were doing wrong.
Marvel’s Howard the Duck also had a similar schtick a decade earlier, so it would’ve been fitting if at this past weekend’s big San Diego Comic Con they had announced that the planned 2026 Marvel film Avengers: Kang Dynasty—which is replacing its title character after actor Jonathan Majors was convicted of assault—were changing its title to Avengers: Duck Dynasty and emphasizing more Deadpool-like high-jinx. The first modern Marvel movie, Howard the Duck, will also have its 40th anniversary in 2026, so there’d be some added synergy.
But that would be an example of drawing the wrong lesson from Deadpool & Wolverine’s success. Very wrong.
Hollywood can be about that stupid in its efforts to make lightning strike twice, though. Some fans think the announcement from San Diego about the new 2026 plan proves it: The replacement for Avengers: Kang Dynasty will be Avengers: Doomsday, and instead of Kang we’ll get (Fantastic Four archenemy) Dr. Doom, the mad scientist/sorcerer/dictator, to be played by none other than Robert Downey Jr., formerly Tony Stark/Iron Man (and formerly a philandering drunk, once more blurring the character/actor divide but increasing the fun).
Some say this move smacks of desperation: A few box office failures prior to Deadpool & Wolverine and out come the greatest hits to compensate. I haven’t entirely lost faith yet, and even go so far as to think Marvel may be sticking to its guns in a good way here. That is, they might still be doing a sort of backdoor Kang thing. Without getting into all the details, Marvel has at least hinted at causal ties between Doctor Strange, the Infinity Stones, Wanda, the Kree, the Noor/djinn, the mutants, the Ten Rings, the Quantum Realm, Kang, Iron Man, and now Dr. Doom (note how many of these things involve time and/or space being distorted by oscillating rings of some kind, long story short), so I think they may yet be tying together a very large and complicated time-travel-tech bow. Mark my vague words. Or not. We’ll see.
If it all turns out to be a mindbogglingly complex scheme of Tony’s (presumably hatched during Avengers: Endgame) to enable him to return and experience a tearful reunion with his daughter, who among us would begrudge him some incidental damage to the space-time continuum and/or to the Fantastic Four’s Baxter Building? Say, is the still-unnamed new owner of Stark Tower we’ve been hearing about for years now a Latverian such as one Victor Von Doom, by any chance?
I’m not saying they planned all of this in advance, but a few box office duds can focus the mind and accelerate some plotlines in a good way, not just a desperate way. If Marvel were still confident, fat, lazy, and seemingly unerring, we probably wouldn’t be getting Dr. Doom and more Downey, it’s true—but we’d probably be getting four movies per year featuring sassy America Chavez and her two lesbian moms as the true “anchor beings”/anchor babies at the heart of the multiverse or something tangential like that. And then even regal Doom would weep!
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey